So don’t do it for free. Start with paid subscriptions to post or something and build that way. Similar things have been done before - the famous tenbux.
However, content creation is not free, even the most well intentioned sites may need ads to keep the lights on. Alternative would be for authors to keep it behind paywall like substack or something
I've felt for a while that a pay-to-post model with a straight chronological feed would solve a lot of the problems of today's social media. I toy with the idea of building it myself.
I like the idea of freemium for this. There are many page builders out there, and many of them have limited plans that are free or very cheap, especially the WordPress ones. Having a free plan distinguishes this, and I think the limit of 50 form submissions is enough to encourage people who should be paying for it to pay.
From a UX perspective, it'd be great, unfortunately getting advertisers hooked into their system would need much more work than it took to actually build the project in the first place.
I was thinking of just putting it out for free until it got too expensive, then asking for donations and if that didn't make ends meet putting some restriction on such as advertisements or a time limit or something.
Except no pay out for you. Maybe the next big site should be backed by crypto or something with token rewards so you make something by building the sure with content?
I want to work on a website for all sorts of publishers, invite / interview process to post as to have no shitposting. Users will be able to register and set a monthly reading budget, which will be divided equally amongst all the authors you read in X time period.
I want this service to have an API so you can easily push content to other platforms like Tumblr, facebook, or your own personal website, housing all your content on my site.
I would use this. I believe in paying people for their hard work and I want the money to go directly into their pockets. No overhead.
There is a time cost for this though, unless you reach a certain size its not really worth the time organising it when you can just slap adsense or the like on there.
There are indeed trade-offs, and I'm aware that most people would prefer to post for free. However, I believe the 100% free model is not sustainable, and it's worth experimenting with different approaches. Companies providing these types of services tend to become hostile towards their users over time in order to pay their bills, resorting to selling personal data, holding user-generated content hostage, or cluttering their websites with ads.
Charging a small transaction fee to the user might also have some advantages: it discourages spam and encourages more thoughtful posting. And we're talking about an amount that is trivial for most users.
Regarding speed, Algorand provides transaction finality in under 4 seconds, which is one of the main reasons I believe it's a good fit for this project. Creating a post or comment is a bit slower than posting on Hacker News, but it still feels pretty fast.
As for scalability, I'd say let's cross that bridge when we get there. Currently, Metapost is only publishing text posts to the blockchain. Hosting things like images or videos would be better suited for IPFS, with only the links being published on the chain.
Build this into a browser, add 10$ a month to the wallet and automatically devide value over the websites you visit. If enough people would do it, it would be great for (independent) content creators.
That being said, I feel like you can't charge people for what you provide. I think it is too much of a limiting factor for the user. Personally, my mind turned off after I looked at pricing. I checked the rest of the site but it was over once I knew you were charging me.
People expect a service like this to be free. It's Chacha vs. KGB, only you don't have the millions that KGB spends on marketing.
That's just my opinion as a member of the freemium or steal-me-sum generation.
And keep in mind that many of us will very happily pay for this. I think it's admirable to want to do this for free, but it's unsustainable. You deserve to be paid for your time. And it will only create a feedback loop of higher quality content that more people want, which you can gauge by whether people are paying.
he should make the platform $5/month to post and free to read. That would likely increase the quality of content and provide another source of revenue.
But understanding its balance between sustainability and popularity, is there a lower bound to free that can ensure the content is posted to seo the space popular?
1-3 free submissions per month would be enough for me.but if I started a sub (which I’ve considered a few times) I’d see enough value to pay.
Love the idea. Good luck. The timing is great. The audience is ready for a new model.
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